"The Kellys have preserved the interior walnut planes, cove lighting and most of the room configurations. They added reinforced window glass, skylights, pink carpet, crystal chandeliers and stained-glass lamps."

"Walls are covered in paintings and prints, whether reproductions of Impressionist masterpieces or folk art portraits, alongside family photos. 'I just like art, I’ve got all kinds of art, I don’t care what it is,' Kelly said. Knickknacks on the shelves include creamy ceramic vessels that her sons made as children and souvenirs of vacations nationwide — the very kind of 'odds and ends of family living' that Woman’s Home Companion had envisioned. A coating of sparkly green stucco on MoMA’s wooden exterior 'makes it maintenance-free,' Shaun Kelly, the eldest son, said.... The property’s 2.7 acres are lush with unusual trees, such as Japanese snowbell and weeping huckleberry. 'If it doesn’t give me a flower, it can’t come here,' Mary Kelly said. Neoclassical stone statues, vintage subway signs and metal filigree benches are scattered around the grounds."

From "MoMA Built a House. Then It Disappeared. Now It’s Found. In 1950, the museum exhibited Gregory Ain’s modernist creation. It’s now nestled in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y." (NYT).

I strongly encourage you — if you have any interest in design — to click through and see the photographs of the house as it was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 and how it looks now, 71 years later, after getting lived in by real people, with their own ideas of what a house should look like. The text I've quoted gives some idea, but the photographs drive home the truly amazing distinction between what professional designers conceive of to meet the needs of ordinary people and what actual people choose for themselves.

Of course, the NYT refrains from laughing or sneering at the Kelly family, but the exposure in the photographs is a bit threatening to their dignity, I think. I notice the NYT does not provide a comments section for this article. I discern that the politically correct response to this article is to mock the original modernist designers and to celebrate the humanity of the Kellys. 

The article quotes a professor who's written about the architect:

“He wanted to solve problems for ordinary working people,” said Anthony Denzer, a professor at the University of Wyoming. Progressive activism, including support for desegregation, and an interest in Soviet architecture helped land Ain on the F.B.I.’s Communist Security Index of “‘dangerous,’ subversive individuals,” Denzer writes in an essay in the forthcoming book “Gregory Ain and the Construction of a Social Landscape.”

Well, I hope that book has something about how the real working people received the designs their social superiors believed were good for them. If not, there's always Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House."

And I love the original house and wish I could find houses like that as I look all over the country for a new place to move into. I would never want a place in the condition the Kellys have created around themselves, but I know from my searching that real estate is designed to house people who share their sensibilities far more than for those who'd love to own the house as it appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.  

ADDED: Looking over at the NYT now, 9 minutes after I posted, I see there is a comments section. Did I miss the comments section before? I don't think so, because the article went up yesterday, and there's only one comment, posted one minute ago. I have to think the NYT noticed my blog post and put up a comments section. 

AND: Now there's a second comment, posted 2 minutes after the first, so I'm sure there was no comments section at the point when I said there was no comments section. Let's see how long before anyone says anything disrespectful about the Kellys. You need to look at the photograph of them to make a valid estimate of the potential for the expression of snobbery from NYT readers.

ALSO: I was looking back at "From Bauhaus to Our House" and hoping to find something about middle class people who do things like what the Kellys did. I found this passage about what rich people do to modern architecture: 

Every new $900,000 summer house in the north woods of Michigan or on the shore of Long Island has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tungsten-halogen lamps, and white cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery. I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out.

Every great law firm in New York moves without a sputter of protest into a glass-box office building with concrete slab floors and seven-foot-ten-inch-high concrete slab ceilings and plasterboard walls and pygmy corridors—and then hires a decorator and gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn these mean cubes and grids into a horizontal fantasy of a Restoration townhouse. I have seen the carpenters and cabinetmakers and search-and-acquire girls hauling in more cornices, covings, pilasters, carved moldings, and recessed domes, more linenfold paneling, more (fireless) fireplaces with festoons of fruit carved in mahogany on the mantels, more chandeliers, sconces, girandoles, chestnut leather sofas, and chiming clocks than Wren, Inigo Jones, the brothers Adam, Lord Burlington, and the Dilettanti, working in concert, could have dreamed of.